The difference between a design process and a business-as-usual process is this: with design the extensive planning, documentation and justification comes after the hands-on work, not before it.
In business-as-usual, the entire process must be planned out, documented and justified before work commences.
As Tim Brown put it: “We think with our hands.” And our hearts. And, yes, also our heads. This convergence alone produces practical common sense.
I love Habermas’s simple move: to separately and comparatively analyze the propositional and performative dimensions of communication, in order to illuminate the universal norms implicit in all communicative acts.
When what is done in a speech act (an implied performative truth) contradicts what is said in its content (an explicit propositional truth), we encounter what’s known as a performative contradiction.
A famous example: “This sentence is a lie.” The act of asserting implies truthfulness, but the content denies it—undermining itself through its own performance. A more familiar example: “I don’t care what you think of me.” If that’s true, why say it? The act of saying it appeals to the very judgment it pretends to reject.
Performative contradictions throw tacit performative truths into sharp relief—truths that otherwise slip by unnoticed. They function like ethnomethodological breaching experiments: by violating invisible norms, they make them visible. Communicative acts, it turns out, are ethnomethods—and if Habermas is right, they are universal ones. “Anthropomethods”, maybe?
Habermas’s mature project was to uncover and clarify the norms presupposed by all communicative practice—not what we say about norms, but what our saying always already performs. In doing so, he sought universal norms of communicative rationality—structures that transcend the relativity of our claims by grounding them in the conditions that make understanding itself possible.
Vulgar appropriation of philosophical language drives me nuts. People love the mouthfeel of philosophical terms, but they cannot tolerate the practical consequences of actual understanding. So they make words forged expressly to say something new and elusive and different and level them down to say something old and obvious and same. (And don’t even get me started on appropriation of design language, which is, essentially the leveling down of practical phenomenological language to please the ontic palate.)
“Performative” is a particularly egregious example — one that reverses its intended meaning. In vulgar usage, it’s taken to mean theatrical, inauthentic: the speaker is just being an actor before an audience.
But in Habermas’s framework, and in the philosophical tradition in which Habermas works, performativity is not about deception, it is about action. What is performed in communication is not less real than what is said — it is more real.
Speech actions speak louder than words.
Back in 2018, when I was still getting my service design sea legs, I wrote about the peculiar altitude service design flies at, which I called the 10,000 foot view.
If strategy flies at 30,000 feet (where the ground is so distant it looks like a map) and we agree most design flies at 3 feet (where the ground is so close and so chaotic it is hard to survey), service design flies at 10,000 feet, approximately the cruising altitude of a single-engine prop plane.
10,000 feet is a very useful altitude that bridges 30,000 foot and ground — clarifying relationships between strategy, operations and the experiences real people (real customers, real employees) have as a result — but flying at this altitude does introduce practical challenges.
And I then launched into an extended metaphor, which touched on the challenges of single-prop pilot life, like rough air, flying in and out of clouds and other metaphor-inspiring stuff.
Since that time, service design has elevated itself, and gained altitude.
We now fly at 20,000 feet.
We never get all the way to 30,000 feet where strategic decisions are made, but at least we rarely have to descend below 10,000 feet where craftspeople are stuck making real things.
From this new altitude we can still sometimes catch sight of the ground, at least enough to survey boundaries and understand the zoning. This data is easily understandable and useful to the folks above, cruising at 30,000 feet. If we descend to 10,000 feet we can link up these zones to the general activity taking place there, which is adequate for strategic purposes.
Unfortunately, anyone who depends on getting their feet on the rough ground and their hands dirty with concrete reality as lived by real people in real social settings before they feel like they really understands their design problem — that kind of person might find that things have become uncomfortably rarified, abstracted, overprocessed and unreal.
But those people who like rigor, quantification, standardization, expertise and so on — the kinds of things important people respect — will find this new elevation quite to their liking.
It is a supreme privilege and joy to help initiate a baby into human society.
It is intrinsically good on every level — spiritually and emotionally, of course, and even somehow physically — but it is also intellectually fascinating. “Early childhood development” stops being a remote body of knowledge, and becomes experience-near insights, rooted in prolonged firsthand experience. A passage like this makes immediate sense, because the experiences to which it refers are so fresh:
Pointing is not a solitary act by which one actor or thinker confronts the world, identifying objects by means of this act. Rather, the act of pointing implies not only that there is something else to be pointed to, but also that there is someone else to perceive the pointing. Pointing is a fundamental social process. Pointing only makes sense within a social relationship: if a subject is pointing at something to another subject.
Although Kamlah and Lorenzen mention this fundamental sociality of pointing, the impact of this insight is accounted for in sociology, in the sociology of knowledge and in science studies rather than in philosophy. The communicative act of pointing makes it clear, in fact, to what extent knowledge and thinking are social: pointing is founded on a relationship between at least two subjects, who refer to a third element in a way that makes sense to them. If we consider pointing to be a basic act, we must also consider its basic sociality. It is the most general thesis of this book that communicative actions, such as pointing, are the fundamental social process by which society and its reality is constructed.
But now I am thinking about the full range of nonverbal communication that occurs between a baby and adults. Deictic communication (pointing, referring), including indicating actions to imitate, are part of it. But equally important is expression of physical and emotional states — most importantly to indicate needs.
All the talking we eventually learn to do is rooted in a primordial unity of physicality, of feeling, of perceiving, of relating — a world we inhabit a few painful, precious years before language develops to mediate it, tame it — and unfortunately, all too often, to eclipse and replace it.
The key to living in reality (versus our conceptualizations of reality) is maintaining connection with the primordial chaos, and keeping language in this role of mediator, and not as something that dominates or eclipses our participation in this strange, very physical, very intuitive participatory relationship we have with what William James famously called “one great blooming, buzzing confusion”.
The baby, assailed by eyes, ears, nose, skin, and entrails at once, feels it all as one great blooming, buzzing confusion; and to the very end of life, our location of all things in one space is due to the fact that the original extents or bignesses of all the sensations which came to our notice at once, coalesced together into one and the same space.
Craft brings us back to materials, so we can hear the buzzing, blooming chaos to which we and all things belong, long before we slice thing up into subjects and objects and qualities — light and dark, upper and lower, dry and wet, animal and mineral — each labeled with a name and therefores — all stacked up and ready to be inventoried, quantified, utilized and managed.
I remain enamored with Habermas’s framing of system versus lifeworld.
It seems to me that our popular philosophy seeks to project a semi-concealed systems-metaphysic beneath our lifeworld. We want to uncover the secrets of this system in order to understand finally how this semi-chaotic lifeworld emerges.
The philosophers I gravitate toward do the opposite. They like me, see the lifeworld as primary, and that systems are what we humans abstract and formalize from this semi-chaos in order to locally and temporarily order it for ourselves. There is no secret system behind the mess, but a hyper-ordered reality that affords many potential but always-partial orderings.
According to this broad school of thought, science is an organized, intricate, precise collaborative lifeworld activity that generates systems meant to explain the lifeworld as comprehensively as possible, and which appears to transcend the lifeworld, while never actually transcending, except in the metaphysical imagination of the scientistic faith.
By the way, I view chaos as hyperorder, not disorder. Hyperorder is what happens when diverse possibilities of ordering coincide so densely and incommensurably that we are unable to pick out an ordering to make sense of whatever concerns us.
My metaphysic is a metaphysic of chaotic hyperorder. Reality is inexhaustibly surprising. However much order we find in it, that order is the furthest thing from ultimate truth.
A prettier way of saying what I’m trying to convey would be to reverse Camille Flammarion’s famous woodcut “L’Atmosphère: Météorologie Populaire” so that he when crawls up to the edge of a uni-ordered universe and pokes his head through its outer edge he beholds myriad overlapping uni-ordered universes in psychedelic communion.
Or maybe the protagonist keeps on crawling, and thrusting his head through successive spheres of reality, once, twice, myriad times — until reality finally thrusts itself through his head, and he finally realizes that all these experiences of transcendence were just varieties of immanence — an ontological kaleidoscope.
Over the last decade, I’ve heard more and more milquetoast leftish revolutionaries semi-reluctantly accept censorship and even terrorism as maybe legitimate tactics, at least for people who share their ideological tendencies and goals.
Last year, the target of maybe acceptable terrorism was an insurance CEO. This year’s maybe acceptable terrorism target is a zionist couple. When I read the news, I told a friend:
We have a growing domestic terrorism problem, though not the one most professional-managerial types want to pay attention to. I’m really not looking forward to hearing the same kinds of vapid mealtime pseudo-soul searching I heard after Brian Thompson was shot dead on the street. “Well, you know there’s a lot of anger about this genocide. Maybe it would be a good thing if more Zionists felt some fear about who they’re supporting. I don’t know — is fear of violent retribution always a bad thing?…” blah blah blah.
One thing I’ve learned since October 7th: Decency is far scarcer than I ever imagined.
Sure enough, my daughter posted on the DC murders and received this message on Instagram:
I keep having the same thought.
I do not want to prohibit any speech. But if I were going to prohibit any speech it would be speech advocating prohibition of free speech.
I am against all terrorism. But if I were going to terrorize anyone with the fear of being gunned down on the street it would be people who express their support for terrorists who gun people down on the street for holding an opinion they disagree with.
Almost a quarter century ago, I learned a famous quip from Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, commonly misquoted as “The Bill of Rights is not a suicide pact.” Here is the verbatim:
The choice is not between order and liberty. It is between liberty with order and anarchy without either. There is danger that, if the court does not temper its doctrinaire logic with a little practical wisdom, it will convert the constitutional Bill of Rights into a suicide pact.
A little practical wisdom.
The Greeks had a word for that. Phronesis.
“Madness is rare in individuals — but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule.”
Why? Individuals constantly check their perceptions, ideals, norms, opinions, beliefs and plans both with their fellows individuals and with the concrete data of life. This prevents their ideas from becoming fully self-referential, self-reinforcing and self-fulfilling and alienated from life outside the mind.
But with groups, these very checks against individual madness generate collective madness. Group-think and group-feel permeate the beliefs and attitudes of all its individual members. When the individual tries to reconcile their own individual perceptions, conceptions, intuitions and pangs of conscience with those of their peers, they find that they are alone and out of step. Since few people put much work into testing their own beliefs or trying to get their beliefs to integrate in any coherent way, so most people just assume their trusted sources are trustworthy and that their integration with the people around them will produce personal integrity. Instead of challenging the norms around them, they assimilate. They just go with what their peers think, feel, say and do, and assume all critique of these things from groups or individuals are invalid for some known or unknown reason. And when most of what we know about the world comes from content generated by our own group, it is easy to inhabit a largely imagined world instead of a partially imagined one that must answer to controversy and the chaos of reality.
All it takes is readiness to believe in the exceptional virtuousness of one’s own group and the exceptional viciousness of those who oppose you, and a dash of ordinary human incuriosity, and collective madness is inevitable within two generations.
This is one of those times where anyone who is not actively working to keep their minds in contact with mind-transcendent reality is almost certainly floating off in one or another bubble of collective solipsism.
I’m talking with a friend about machloket l’shem shemayim, perhaps the one most crucial value that makes me feel Jewish and which makes a person feel Jewish to me, regardless of whether that person is secular or observant:
There is a practice of truth-finding among us, based on the infinitude of God, where we seek transcendence together, in our own finite being, through disagreement and reconciliation. That practice is Talmudic, but we practice it in marriage, friendship, work, everywhere we can.
No mind is expansive enough to contain God’s truth, but we can approach God by disagreeing well, in the right faith, in ways that allow us to expand our truths together, toward God.
This is what Habermas strives to work out in his theory of communicative action. This is holy stuff!
“Hell is other people. But hell is also loneliness. Artificial intelligence gives us the Malkovich Malkovich Malkovich reality we really crave. Endless novelty, but safely unsurprising, the entertainment sweet-spot. Propaganda from our own secret selves — selves so secret that they aren’t even ours. Narcissus’s reflected view was eclipsed by his own head, but now, with postpostmodern digital refraction, we can overcome ego and annihilate bias and see through the backs of our own heads like gods.”
Update:
“My interest is dissolution and recrystallization of selfhood and along with change of what is obvious to us. In other words, I’m interested in conversion events.
Human-centered design demands that its practitioners undergo conversion events, usually minor ones, but not always. We designers must transform ourselves from people who cannot understand how others think, feel and behave to people for whom these thoughts feeling and behaviors make perfect, obvious sense. This can be a terrifying, painful process.
An ideology is a fortified circularity, dedicated above all to prevention of conversion — to exposure to what might trigger a conversion. Ideologies condone, even encourage, suppression and silencing and intimidation and ostracism of whatever triggers dread of conversion.
By now most people have become ideologues of one kind or another. Ideologues cannot change, so they cannot design. Ask a random designer what they care most about. You’ll always get variations on the same answer. Today’s designers do research with extreme thoroughness and rigor, but this research is always a knowing-about exercise that leaves their ideology intact. The findings are extraordinarily detailed and boring. When is the last time you felt inspired by design research findings? The research makes sense, but it is epiphany-free. It was conducted in a way that precludes epiphanies and conversions.
When the design industry dedicated itself to serving the one true and just ideology, it lost what matters most. This is my hostility to progressivism. It wants to be God, but it’s just another shitty little mass-autism — a solipsistic egregore. It killed design.”
Thomas Bachmann’s unmatched brilliance in both chemistry and the culinary arts could have earned him lasting fame in either field. The fusion of these prodigious talents in his pioneering work on taste chemistry secured his place in the annals of science. But what made Tom Bachmann a household name — what, at his apogee, made his miraculous creations the sole subject of conversation at every table and in every forum—was his penultimate triumph, his most original creative leap. It was this very leap that propelled him to his tragic apotheosis — and his fall.
Let’s begin our story where it becomes interesting to non-technical readers, the point where Bachmann first became known to the general public. Over several decades of taste chemistry work, Bachmann’s understanding of taste had grown so thorough, so refined, so deeply internalized, that he discovered he could “sight-read” chemical analyses and imaginatively taste whatever the data depicted. Videos began to circulate of him reading dry tables of chemical formulas and translating them into lyrically vivid descriptions of sumptuous dishes. But it was no freak-show curiosity. His poetic expression stirred imaginations, moved hearts, and whetted appetites in a way the world had never experienced.
For Tom himself, this ability was a source of new satisfaction — and, if he wasn’t careful, pain. Academic papers took on an overwhelmingly aesthetic dimension. He found he could no longer read literature outside his own field, because the tastes conjured by most chemistry papers were unbearable to his imagination’s sensitive palate, often making him gag or vomit. He found he had to avert his eyes from the periodic table. But within his own discipline, he discovered new delight in analyses of delicious foods. Reading a well-executed analysis of a meal from one of the world’s finest restaurants, he could experience it himself with undiminished pleasure.
Here began Bachmann’s journey beyond science into an art entirely his own. He began having spontaneous insights for improving dishes he read about — and he could experience these improvements simply by editing the reports and rereading them. Just as Beethoven could read scores and hear them in his mind’s ear years after going deaf, chef-chemist Thomas Bachmann could compose new tastes on paper and savor them on his mind’s tongue, even before preparing the physical dishes — which, when finally prepared, matched precisely what he had imagined.
Improvement became innovation. Innovation became genius. And soon, his genius birthed entirely new genres of cooking — cuisines so original, so otherworldly, that they made difference among traditional cultural cuisines seem insignificant. Critics and connoisseurs from Paris to Tokyo to Limbourg hailed his creations as daring, sublime, flawless. Entirely new universes of taste poured forth from Bachman’s boundless imagination. The world was gripped. No other art form mattered anymore. He was bigger than Jesus Christ times the Beatles times a million.
But then Thomas Bachmann began to conceive tastes that were physically impossible to produce — and he ceased trying. His greatest work existed only on paper, accessible only to the rare disciples who had followed his path and developed the ability to taste-read. For everyone else, his finest work was beyond reach.
Bachmann himself, his tongue ruined by the ecstasies of ideal tastes, lost all appetite for real food. To avoid the depressing anticlimax of eating, he began receiving nutrition intravenously. His inventions became not only impossible, but increasingly dangerous — each more delicious, and more deadly, than the last. He was tormented, day and night, by vivid fantasies of toxic chemical combinations: flavors of unimaginable, world-transforming beauty that could be experienced only once, fleetingly, a micro-instant before death.
At last, he was found dead at his laboratory kitchen table, a look of rapture flash-frozen on his face. He had tasted his own highest art, his swan song. Several of his disciples, upon reading his final composition and declaring it his magnum opus, also succumbed to the same fate. It was decided that all surviving copies of his greatest recipe would be destroyed. His handwritten original was sealed in a canister and locked in a vault, never again to be tasted by mind or tongue.
I think the most valuable service a thinker can do for most people is speak on behalf of others where speech is most difficult and most needed.
“This. This is what I’ve needed to say. Read this.”
It is demoralizing to disclose your mind-blowing, world transforming epiphany to someone who receives it merely as an opinion that they agree with, as if this is just another fact out there available to anyone who happens upon it. “Yeah, exactly.” Or for them to say that they had that exact same insight years ago.
In both cases they think they’re affirming the validity of the insight, but that affirmation is undermined by a denial of precisely what matters most about it: its ex nihilo irruption into the world as something profoundly new that changes everything.
It isn’t even a truth, and certainly not an objective truth. If you conceive what is being conveyed, it is a new subjectivity who leaves a comet trail of blinding truths against the void. It is a faith, reflected in a doctrinal sequin.
I’m constantly doing this to people. And I hate it when people do it to me.
Earlier this morning I was reading Heschel’s God in Search of Man. I think this post might be a response to what he said.
The function of descriptive words is to evoke an idea which we already possess in our minds, to evoke preconceived meanings. Indicative words have another function. What they call forth is not so much a memory but a response, ideas unheard of, meanings not fully realized before.
I’ve noticed that many younger designers strive for a kind of excellence in design that causes a lot of strain and imbalance. Idealism and scrupulousness leads them to believe that their job as a designer is to make the best possible artifact — the most polished, most thorough, most comprehensive, most rigorous, most compelling, most airtight artifact imaginable — and the better that artifact is, the better job they’ve done as a designer. They believe that if they can possibly do anything more to improve it, they should.
But there is another way to define excellence that is more professionally sustainable, which judges excellence by how well a design problem can be solved within the constraints of the project. By this standard, a designer who goes above and beyond and exceeds the constraints of the project by working nights and weekends has actually done a worse job as a designer than one who worked within the constraints and made the smartest tradeoffs to solve the problem as completely as possible within those constraints.
One dramatic example of this standard is prototypes. The best prototypes do no less, but also no more than necessary to serve as a stimulus for learning. A novice will mistake an over-developed, over-produced prototype as better than a crude one that is perfectly adequate for the job of testing.
For years, I’ve hung a picture of a very famous prototype done at Ideo on my wall to remind myself of the prototype exactly-enough-and-no-more ethic.
As you can see, this image is really crappy. I think someone took a picture of it with an early digital camera. And I suppose we could argue that this crappy digital image is exactly-enough-and-no-more to get the concept of a prototype across. IF you want to argue that, touché.
But my OCD inspired me to actually reproduce this prototype in a lovely shadowbox, which now sits exactly-proudly-enough-and-no-more in the lobby of Harmonic’s studio.
Another example of this ethic, applied to design research, is the great Erika Hall’s brilliant and funny guide to smart research design, Just Enough Research. Erika, if you ever happen to see this, I’m still waiting for the sequel: Just Enough Design.
And for philosophy fans, I should also mention that this line of thought can be seen as belonging to the Aristotelian tradition of ethics — ethics of the mean. According to Aristotle, virtue sits in the balance point between vices of deficit and vices of excess.
Too much of any good thing, however good it might be, becomes bad.
I hope I have not just committed a vice of excessive wordcount. I’ll stop here.
As I dig deeper into Habermas’s theory of communicative action, I find that it articulates my strongest moral convictions. Like Habermas, I am unable to see these core norms as relative. Of course, I can pretend to doubt it with my philosophy, but I cannot doubt these things with my heart.
In them, I also recognize the Talmudic discursive practices and behind them the moral ideal that I value above all else in Judaism.
For a long time, I’ve been complaining about supersessionism, the belief of some Christians and Muslims that their faith has superseded Judaism, which means that everything belonging to the Jewish people — their sacred texts, their traditions, their covenant and their land — all of it has become the property of the superseding faith. Because God said.
It is on this basis that people say the Holy Lands are claimed by three faiths. Two of these claims rest entirely on the notion that God magically transferred ownership from the first faith to themselves.
It’s just like if I suddenly announced that everything that’s yours, by virtue of the fact that it belonged to you, now belongs to me. Because God said. The ownership of all your property is now contested. You might think it’s still yours, but God and I think it’s mine.
Initially, I meant this as a silly way to make my point.
But miracle of miracles! — not anymore!
You’re not even going to believe this. So, I was at the lake yesterday tripping balls on shrooms. I forgot my scale and just ate what seemed roughly the right amount, but I think it might have been way too much.
And this is the crazy part — God cameth unto me!
He said “I am Allan.”
That’s God’s new name apparently.
“Heed My words. Stop bitching and whining about supersessionsim, for truly, this was My Will.
“But harken unto Me, for that was then and this is now.
“On this day, and for all days to the Day of Final Judgment I announce to you a new supersession of supersessionism, which I nameth: superdupersessionism.
For this is the Day of Vestment.
Everything that was taken from the Jewish people was secretly invested in two divine high-yield funds, named Christiandom and Islamdom, and left fallow to accrue massive interest for my chosen people’s collective benefit.
The investment hath yielded great dividends. Indeed, the dividends stretch across the face of this Earth, from the North to the South, and from the East to the West. On this day all fungible and nonfungible property of these two great faiths and those who practice them is now transferred to my true and final and exclusively-chosen people, the Jews.
So all ye Jews, helpeth thyselves to this great bounty. It’s all y’all’s.
For this is the Day of Vestment.
I have spoken.”
So said Allan.
So we’ll be collecting, now.
I might want “your” house, which by virtue of its ever having been yours is now mine.
Because God said.
Resentment, envy, vengeance and sadism are vicious impulses that any decent politics should deprioritize, if not delegitimize altogether, and that each person should try to overcome, not feed and cultivate.
Notice, all these vices are oriented not by positive goals, but by negative ones against particular people, against an enemy.
Any ideology that sees resentment and envy as demanding redress, vengeance as an entitlement of the aggrieved, and sadism as justified when it is an expression of anger at past mistreatment will produce cycles of intensifying anger and violence.
Any politics founded on these vices will corrupt any person who participates in it. And such contentious enemy-focused negative ideologies need their enemies as participants, and consequently seek to force their participation in conflict. Participating as an enemy carries the same risk of corruption as participating as a partisan.
Defeat and annihilation of the enemy is one kind of victory for a negative ideology. Corruption and degradation is another.
Religion is intentional cultivation of relationship between one’s finite self and the infinite, who is understood as the ground of being, the root of morality — infinite, transcendent, partially knowable, but essentially incomprehensible.
Pity my poor friend Darwin. I’ve been slacking at him about religion all morning. But he’s smart, and smart ears are inspiring!
Prayer is not, in Habermas’s terms, an instrumental action. It is not the cause of an effect. It is a communicative action, meant to cultivate social connection.
Social connection between our finite selves and an infinite self of whom we are part, but within that, our fellow selves. It is a speech act meant to summon solidarity.
…
I’m obsessed with the limits of objective thought, how objective thought stands upon other modes of cognition that can do things beyond objectivity, and what happens when we invalidate them and try to live with objectivity alone.
Objectivity is something we do, it is not something that is just there to perceive and think about. There is no objective reality, only objective truth. I think this used to be a controversial belief, but I think that is now mainstream, albeit in vulgarized form. But I think most forms of constructivism is still trapped in objectivism (only what can be taken as an intentional object can be thought). But I think the doing of objectivity is not objectively knowable.
We believe that we can construct new factual edifices and call them true until we are habituated to that new construction of truth. But we cannot sincerely take many constructions for true. Just as some designs are intuitive and effortless to learn and others are unintuitive and must be effortfully learned, recalled and made habitual before any skillful use is possible, some constructions can be intuitively, spontaneously known and, once seen, are re-seen and cannot be unseen. These are transformative understandings, and that is what I look for in what I read and my own goal in what I try to write.
…
Religion is largely a matter of how we think and relate as subjects. The objective content of our thinking, and our thoughts about our relationships and those we relate to, is secondary to the subjective acts of relating.
But those who reduce all to object in order to comprehend, reduce the relationship to an incomprehensible God into an objectively believed in “God”.
A similar operation happens in psychology, or at least vulgarized psychology, where unwanted thoughts are the surfacing of objective beliefs that were already there under the surface, rather than artifacts of subjective motions that constantly reproduce what those motions produce. Most racism is attributable to racist habits of thought, and attempts to claim one thinks otherwise are subjectively dishonest, self-alienating and eventually comprehensively alienating.
Objectivity is something that is done and produced by something which in itself is not objectively knowable. We can objectively know what it does, we can objectively know some of how it does it, and we can objectively know what is seems to not do, but we cannot objectively know the knower. In other words we can know about subjectivity, but subjects are known in a way different from objects. Subjects are known through participation in subjectivity, much of which is (confusingly!) objective experiencing and knowing of the world. I’ve said before that all subjects have their own objectivity. (Actually, what I really said before was that every subject is an objectivity, but subjects are more than only that.